“I Lost My Title”, What Losing the Title Duplicate Means in the Dominican Republic, and What to Do Today It is one of the most frequent calls a Dominican real estate lawyer receives, and it always carries the same undertone of panic: the title is gone. Lost in a move, destroyed in a flood, missing […]
A Roof Guaranteed by Law: Constituting a Right of Use Over Dominican Property Between letting someone live in your property informally and giving them a full usufruct lies a figure Dominican practice underuses: the right of use (derecho de uso). Drawn from the Civil Code, it grants its holder the right to use another’s property, […]
Mine, Not Ours: The Declaration of Separate Property in Dominican Marriages Dominican law’s default marital regime, the community of property, comes with a powerful presumption: what is acquired during the marriage belongs to both spouses. It is a fair default and a dangerous one, because not everything acquired during a marriage is actually community property. […]
The Long Road: The Ordinary Real Estate Foreclosure in the Dominican Republic Every legal system has a default, and in Dominican real estate execution the default is the ordinary foreclosure of the Civil Procedure Code: the full-dress procedure, inherited from the French tradition, through which a creditor armed with an enforceable title seizes, advertises and […]
Amending the Building’s Constitution: The Modification of the Condominium Regime A condominium’s founding documents are drafted at a moment, and buildings outlive moments. The developer’s master plan adds a phase the original declaration never described; owners want to convert a commercial ground floor to residential use, or the reverse; common areas are reconfigured, units merged […]
The House on Someone Else’s Land: Registering Improvements in Favor of a Third Party Walk through any Dominican town and you will see the legal situation this procedure exists for: the house a son built on his mother’s parcel, the second floor a sister added over the family home, the business a nephew raised on […]
Ownership on Layaway: The Conditional Sale of Dominican Real Estate Dominican law offers installment sellers two philosophies of protection. The firstcovers the transfer ownership now and secure the unpaid price with a privilege or mortgage, the buyer owns, the seller holds security. The second inverts the architecture entirely: the conditional sale (venta condicional de inmuebles), […]
Trading Properties: The Permuta and Its Double Life at the Title Registry Before money, there was this. The permuta, the exchange of one property for another, is commerce’s original transaction, and it survives in Dominican practice because certain situations still solve better in kind than in cash: the developer trading finished units to a landowner […]
Rights That Cross the Boundary Line: Constituting Easements Over Dominican Property No parcel is an island, legally speaking. Land depends on its neighbors, for access to the road, for the passage of water and power, for drainage that follows gravity rather than boundaries, for the view that gives a hillside property its price. The easement […]
Neutral Hands: The Judicial Sequestration of Disputed Dominican Property Some property disputes have a problem more urgent than who is right: who holds the asset while the question is decided. The co-heir occupying the estate’s best property and collecting its rents through years of partition litigation; the contested company premises run by one faction; the […]
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